CHICAGO (GenomeWeb) – Clinical genomics interpretation software vendor Congenica announced today it is partnering with an Irish neurological research center to develop new technology to improve diagnosis of genetic epilepsies.
Congenica and FutureNeuro, the Science Foundation Ireland-backed Research Centre for Chronic and Rare Neurological Diseases, said that they would build on Congenica's Sapientia platform to bring genomics into clinical decision-making for epilepsy. They will seek to integrate genomic sequences into electronic health records to augment the imaging that clinicians have historically relied on to diagnose and treat certain forms of epilepsy.
"The types of genetic mutations that this project will focus on are thought to be at the root of as much as 40 percent of childhood epilepsy," David Atkins, CEO of Cambridge, England-based Congenica, said in a statement.
"Neurologists need to embrace [genomics] as a new powerful diagnostic tool to allow us to understand the many challenging faces of epilepsy, and lead us to individualizing treatment and prognosis in the clinic," added Norman Delanty, a clinical neurologist at FutureNeuro in Dublin.
The partners said they will start by testing the potential of Sapientia to diagnose epilepsy by linking the software's existing base on epilepsy knowledge with sequencing information coming out of FutureNeuro. They have not specified plans for later stages of their collaboration.
Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.